Recently by Michael Banks

By Michael Banks

Whilst trawling the web this morning I came across a few blog posts showing the first pictures of the damage caused by the magnet failure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on 19 September.

The pictures were apparently shown during a presentation by the lab’s director general Robert Aymar on Friday at a meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators held at CERN.

The US/LHC blog posted a link to slides of Aymar’s talk. However, within an hour of the post (on 1 December) access to the talk had been restricted. Fortunately, particle physicist Stephanie Majewski from Brookhaven National Laboratory, who is at CERN for a year, posted the pictures from the talk on her blog.

From the two images, probably the more striking picture is the one that shows the region between the magnets that was crunched due to the pressure as the helium escaped into the tunnel. The other image shows a magnet unattached from its mount, which is secured to the concrete floor in the tunnel.

CERN is planning to release a full report in early December about the damage to the LHC, outlining the repair schedule and plans for operation in 2009.

By Michael Banks

Ever since the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced a £80m shortfall in its budget late last year — to the wide condemnation of physicists in the UK — here at Physics World we have been trying to cover every twist and turn.

In September — after an STFC programmatic review spelling out which programmes would be funded — we ran opinion pieces in the magazine about the debacle from Brian Foster, European director of the global design effort for the International Linear Collider (ILC), as well as Keith Mason, chief executive of the STFC itself.

We have known for a few months now which facilities would be funded by the STFC in full — and which, like the Gemini telescopes and the ILC, would see the UK’s involvement cut back. What was not known, though, was how much research grants would be slashed.

The STFC earlier in the year issued a warning that up to 25% of grants could be cancelled over the next three years and those that have been issued could even be recalled as a result of the budget deficit. As Foster underlined in his opinion piece: “never before have grants that have been already issued been recalled and cut.”

However, the STFC has now pulled a rabbit out of the hat and come up with £9m over the next two years to plough into the research grants programme. The extra cash will reduce the original shortfall in grants funding by a half. A spokesperson for the STFC told me the new money has come from within the budget allocation and not from any external source. “[It originated from] how we manage our risks and our exposure to foreign currency fluctuations,” the spokesperson added.

This seems surprising as exposure to currency fluctuations was one of the main reasons given by the STFC management for its woes. However, for the time being physicists seem happy. “The flexibility that STFC have employed in addressing the reduction in grants is very welcome,” says particle physicist Mark Lancaster from University College London, who has been campaigning against the STFC cuts.

The new money will be available for the next grants round, but the STFC do not yet know how it will be distributed across sub-disciplines.

By Michael Banks

Since the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded this week to three Japanese-born researchers, it seems like Japan has gone particle-physics crazy, or at least the Japanese government has.

So much so that Japan now wants to host the next big experiment in particle physics — the International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC is the successor to the $8bn proton smasher the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva that switched on, and then off, following a magnet failure almost a month ago.

According to a design study unveiled in early 2007, the machine is estimated to cost $8bn with the host country expected to pay $1.8bn - around 22% of the total cost — to dig the 40 km tunnel and supply electricity and water. When operational, the ILC will smash together electrons and its anti-particle twin, positrons, as they are accelerated to near the speed of light.

After the Nobel Prize was announced on Tuesday, a Japanese government spokesman said they will use the prize as “a tailwind” to advance its involvement with physics research. This comes as good news to particle physicists who saw the US cut its funding for the ILC last year by 75% to $15m, and with the UK now only carrying out basic research into the project following a funding crisis at one of its main research councils.

Indeed, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) — set up by the US Department of Energy last year to plan the next decade in high-energy physics — published a report in June saying the US should have “a significant role in the ILC wherever it is built”, but stopped short of saying that it should be constructed in the US.

So maybe the time is right for Japan to stake its claim.

Artist’s impression of the GIOVE-A probe, which was launched three years ago. (Courtesy: ESA).

By Michael Banks

This morning, in the huge exhibition hall at this year’s International Astronautical Congress, I caught up with Martin Sweeting, chief executive of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) and chairman of the local organizing committee for this year’s event.

The company that he founded in 1985 at Surrey University focuses on building and operating “micro” satellites, which are around 100 kg in mass. Sweeting recalled how, back in the 1980s, people laughed at the idea of having smaller satellites. At the time, satellites were getting ever bigger, with larger scientific payloads on board. But the sceptics soon turned silent: the market for small commercial satellites has seen year-on-year growth, with SSTL itself having a market turnover of £21m in 2006.

In his talk yesterday evening at the congress, Sweeting compared the traditional large satellites as “dinosaurs” having themselves evolved from smaller satellites. Indeed, Sputnik - the world’s first artificial satellite - was the size of a beach ball.

I asked Sweeting if the comparison was apt, given that large satellites are still needed for landers to the Moon and Mars as well as for possible manned missions.

Michael Griffin

By Michael Banks

When Physics World talked to NASA boss Michael Griffin in July - on the occasion of NASA’s 50th birthday — he noted that the agency hoped to have manned missions to the Moon by 2020 and Mars by 2050. Griffin reiterated that view in a session yesterday at the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow with heads of agency and industry space leaders. However, he also warned about putting too much priority on a potential Mars mission. “We have had only 27 Earth days on the Moon,” said Griffin, referring to the previous six Apollo manned lunar missions. “But our dependents will think we are idiots; that we don’t know enough about the Moon, if we don’t revisit it.”

For anyone who thinks a mission to Mars would be the space equivalent of a walk in the park, Griffin put the potential mission in context. “Mars is an interesting place for human beings,” he said, “but we have to show that astronauts can survive the mission time by first putting them for seven months on the International Space Station (ISS) then 9-12 months on the moon followed by another 7 months on the ISS.”

Enrico Saggese

By Michael Banks

Yesterday afternoon here at the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow, I had a brief chat with Enrico Saggese, the controversial new commissioner of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Saggese was recently installed by the Italian government after it sacked his predecessor (and one-time Physics World author) — Giovanni Bignami — following the mass resignation of the agency’s seven-member administrative council. The space agency is normally led by a president who chairs the council. But in August, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi replaced the council with a commissioner and deputy commissioner, discarding Bignami, who had been president, in the process.

I asked Saggese why Berlusconi changed the structure of the agency when Bignami was replaced. “There are situations which happen where you have to reorganise the agency internally”, Saggese explained rather opaquely, “but there are a group of people around me, such as a magistrate taking care of what I am doing, so I am not a powerful man.”

By Michael Banks

The weather was dry as I arrived yesterday at the armadillo-shaped congress centre in Glasgow for the 59th International Astronautical Congress. But there was no need for delegates to ask what the weather forecast would be for the rest of the week. Even before I had had the chance to register, I had already picked up two conference freebies. They were both umbrellas.

The IAC is a huge global meeting at which the international space industry and national space agencies come together to show their wares and find out what everyone is up to. In the afternoon, just as the first rain clouds were opening up, the heads of national agencies came together for a briefing session. NASA boss Mike Griffin was joined on the panel by other space-agency chiefs such as ROSCOSMOS deputy head Alexander Medvedchikov from Russia, the Chinese National Space Administration’s boss Sun Laiyan, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency head Keji Tachikawa as well as Byrana Suresh, director of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.

By Michael Banks

Many physicists in the UK have spent the past six months fuming after the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced an £80m shortfall in its budget late last year. The STFC said it would deal with the shortfall by pulling out of plans for the International Linear Collider and withdrawing from the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Numerous experiments in particle physics and astronomy also faced the axe or severe cuts.

Stunned by the reaction from the community, the STFC quickly set up a consultation with physicists, the final outcome of which was due to be announced at a meeting with physicists and the media at the Royal Society in London yesterday. In fact, the STFC told the media of its plans last week, although I still decided to attend the meeting as I knew that STFC chief executive Keith Mason, science-board chair Peter Knight and John Womersley director of science programmes at the STFC would all be there.

But what could have turned out to be a lively debate into how the £80m black hole in the budget of the STFC occurred ended up as a rather drab affair. Generally, members of the physics community were pleased with how the consultation process went and had even accepted that some projects would sadly have to face the axe. Indeed, almost all physicists who asked a question began by praising the STFC into how it conducted the consultation period.

Any chance of a surprise announcement at the meeting had of course vanished due to last week’s unveiling of the final programmatic outcome. The STFC had decided that some projects that had faced the funding axe would now be saved, including the e-MERLIN project - containing the Jodrell Bank observatory. In other words, the community and media already knew what projects were going to be funded.

What was bizarre for me and other members of the media is that we were prevented from asking any questions in the open session because there was going to be time to do so afterwards in a separate session for journalists. However, this session never materialised, and when I went and asked an STFC spokesperson what happened to the media session I was told that as the outcome had been made public last week, there was no need for one!

It was a shame that the media were not given the chance to ask questions with the community present. Instead we had to approach Mason, Knight and Womersley to quiz them at the end of the meeting as they were preparing to leave.

I myself had wanted to ask Mason about the Gemini project. I am still intrigued to know how and by whom that decision was made early in March to pull UK involvement in the project completely. Not only would this have been a scientific loss, but also would have meant a financial loss as the UK has put around £35m into the 8m class telescopes based in Hawaii and Chile. Additionally, the UK would also have induced a financial penalty for pulling out.

Both these points must have been known to the management of STFC. In the final outcome, the UK has now been reinstated as a full member in the Gemini consortium, but will sell 50% of its observing time to other members.

There was a change of tune within the community from the hostilities earlier in the year. Both parties are probably thinking that damage is now being done to the image of physics not only in the UK but internationally as well.

Possibly one of the most outspoken critics of STFC, Michael Rowan Robinson from Imperial College London, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society, was pleased at how the STFC have listened to the community.

But, he added, “I am still saddened that we had to go through all that in the last eight months and damaged our international reputation. I still don’t understand why we went through it.”

The first words that came from Mason in response were, rather discouragingly, “I don’t either.”

By Michael Banks

I have been closely following events concerning a new class of iron-based superconductors ever since Physics World broke the story about their discovery in March. The new materials, containing planes of iron and arsenic separated by planes of lanthanum and oxygen, offer high temperature superconductivity without the need of copper-oxide planes as in the cuprates.

The challenge now is to understand how these superconductors work, i.e. what the responsible pairing mechanism is. Early calculations showed that the superconductivity cannot be described by electron-phonon coupling. The mechanism could therefore be similar to cuprate-based superconductors, which currently hold the record for the highest superconducting transition temperature (although the mechanism in the cuprates is still not understood).

Now, however, a paper published in Nature suggests that SmFeAsOF, which is the same as the material in the story we reported in March but with the lanthanum replaced by samarium, may behave quite differently to the cuprates. The paper’s authors, who are based in the US and China, show that SmFeAsOF has a ‘single gap’ in the density of states of the Cooper-pair fluid (an energy gap originates since there is a finite amount of energy needed to break the pair of electrons held in a Cooper-pair). The temperature dependence of the gap was found to obey conventional BCS predictions — the theory named after Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer that proposes electron attraction, via phonons, to form cooper-pairs.

This is all different from the cuprates, which don’t follow BCS predictions and also have a so-called ‘pseudo-gap’, which as I understand only allows certain electrons to ‘see’ a gap depending on how the travel with respect to the crystal lattice. The authors found no evidence of a ‘pseudo-gap’ in the new materials. So it seems that the materials follow BCS predictions, but with a superconducting transition temperature that is too high to be explained via electron-phonon coupling. The mystery deepens.

In another recent development, researchers in Switzerland have managed to grow single crystals of the Sm based iron superconductor. All research done before was performed on polycrystalline samples, but now opening research into single crystals means finding those elusive mechanisms may be a step closer.

One of the most sought after theories in condensed matter physics is that of high temperature superconductivity. It is hard to walk into these kind of talks and understand what is going on. If it is theory, it’s next to impossible as the first slide almost jumps into a large Hamiltonian, and as I guess these Hamiltonian’s have been discussed ad nauseum by now, people have started to not even describe any of the terms.

In a talk given by Doug Scalapino from the University of California at Santa Barbara, he discussed the question of a pairing ‘glue’ in high temperature superconductors. From what I understand this goes back to last year when Phil Anderson wrote a perspectives in science with the point that if “we have a mammoth and an elephant in our refrigerator - do we care much if there is also a mouse?”

Here the mammoth and the elephant are U, the on site repulsion and J, the exchange interaction in the Hubbard model which describes the transition between conducting and insulating systems. So Anderson says as these interactions are so large why do we need a mouse or a much smaller interaction that is the ‘glue’ that pairs electrons. In ordinary superconducting metals, like lead or Tin, these exchanged particles are phonons (lattice vibrations) that act like a bosonic “glue” to hold the electron pairs together. But what is the ‘glue’ for high temperature superconductors, like the cuprates? Anderson contends that the pairing interaction is coming from J which is instantaneous, attractive and large, so why do we need a smaller interaction to describe the bosonic glue?

Well, the glue that Scalapino was describing was not very clear to me, and it seems that was also the case with some audience members. Indeed, one person did ask at the end of the talk what is the glue and Scalapino’s answer was, well, spin fluctuations. But as Anderson points out these are just a natural consequence of the exchange interaction, J.

I think the jury is still out.